The Four Seasons

Netflix's "The Four Seasons," which dropped in May 2025, is Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield's eight-episode reworking of the 1981 Alan Alda film. Three long-married couples take four vacations across a year, one per season. Kate and Jack (Fey and Will Forte) are the tightly wound anchor pair. Nick and Anne (Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver) are approaching their 25th anniversary, and Nick is quietly not okay about it. Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) are the couple everyone else secretly wants to be. In the first episode, Nick tells his best friends he's planning to blow up his marriage, and the group has to figure out what that means for the rest of them.

The cast is the whole pitch and the cast delivers. Carell plays midlife panic with a jittery, apologetic charm that keeps Nick from becoming a punchline. Fey writes and performs Kate as a woman who has organized her friendships to within an inch of their lives and is horrified to discover that hasn't fixed anyone. Domingo is doing extremely fine work as the group's emotional weather vane, warm without going sappy. Forte is the sneaky MVP, playing a guy whose bit is that he has no bit. The Fey/Fisher/Wigfield writers' room knows the "old friends on a trip" beat cold from "30 Rock" and "Never Have I Ever," and the scripts respect that these people have twenty years of shorthand. The locations look expensive without looking like ads. And at 30-ish minutes an episode, it never overstays.

It's soft. The half-hour Netflix comedy pace means most conflicts get raised, chewed, and half-resolved inside a single episode, which flattens what should be sharper. Some couples get more oxygen than others; Kerri Kenney-Silver in particular deserves more runway than she gets. The show reveres its source material to a fault, occasionally pausing for a scene that plays like a footnote to the 1981 movie instead of its own thing. And if you want jokes-per-minute, this isn't that. It's a dramedy that tilts toward drama more than the marketing suggests.

If "Big Chill," Nancy Meyers kitchens, and "Grace and Frankie" all sound appealing, you're the target audience. Fans of "Somebody Somewhere" or the quieter stretches of "Only Murders in the Building" will settle right in. You'll bounce if you came for "30 Rock" density, if you have no patience for characters in their 50s processing their feelings by a lake, or if you need a show to have real narrative propulsion instead of vibes and vacation homes.

WORTH IT lands because the craft is genuinely there. Direction from Fey's regular collaborators keeps the ensemble scenes readable without feeling staged. Performances carry subtext the scripts trust them to carry, particularly in the Nick-and-Anne material, where Carell and Kenney-Silver do a lot with very little dialogue. The show has opinions about long marriages, aging friend groups, and the specific selfishness of blowing up a stable life, and it delivers those opinions the right way: through people behaving badly on camera, not through speeches. Nobody monologues the thesis. Nobody stops the scene to be agreed with. The messaging is baked into who these characters are and how they hurt each other, which is what a dramedy is supposed to do. It's not "The Bear." It's not trying to be. It's a well-cast, well-written, slightly too polite show about grown-ups, and grown-up shows that don't lecture are rarer than they should be. Worth the eight half-hours.